4 Career Development Activities for Employees

For employees to really grow and expand their capabilities, you need to offer them opportunities that allow them to step outside of their traditional duties. Often, this requires some upfront coordination. In an article for Bizfluent, Priti Ramjee recommends four types of activities you might arrange:

Job rotations

Mentoring

Internships

Learning groups

Managing Growth Opportunities

About job rotations, Ramjee writes this:

Being in one position for a long time can stifle an employee’s growth. As a career development strategy, job rotation breaks the monotony by moving an employee, temporarily, into another position to gain exposure to another function. As an activity, have your employees participate in a series of job rotations based on their individual learning needs. Upon completion of the rotation, your employees are capable of applying what was learned to their current position and assisting in new functions within the organization.

Next, you already know what mentoring is, but making mentoring a formalized part of operations can make people more inclined to use it and grow as a result of it. Formal mentoring can pair mentor and mentee according to need and context, and it can also prescribe the types of mentoring to be conducted. Maybe this is too much corporate oversight for some, but for others, such structure could be really helpful.

Ramjee’s tips for “internship activities” would benefit from further elaboration than what she provides; her ideas are vague and underdeveloped. But her final idea, learning groups, is more straightforward. People with common career interests can get together during lunch or early in the morning (or whenever it will not clash with work) to informally discuss their knowledge and skills. Accompanied by newsletters and the like, learning groups can be an effective way for employees to learn new things with a minimum of effort.

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